(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 492: Have Cities Run Out of Land?

This week we’re joined by Chris Redfearn of USC and Anthony Orlando of Cal Poly Pomona to discuss their paper – Houston, you have a problem: How large cities accommodate more housing. We talk about why “pro-business” Texas housing markets are catching up to “pro-regulation” California and what it might mean for future city growth.

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Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of this episode:

Jeff Wood (40s):
Anthony Orlando and Chris Redfern. Welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Chris Redfearn (1m 20s):
Glad to be here.

Anthony Orlando (1m 21s):
Thanks for having us.

Jeff Wood (1m 21s):
Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves and we’ll start with Chris and then go with Anthony.

Chris Redfearn (1m 26s):
I’m a professor at USC. I’ve been teaching there for 24 years now. I got my PhD in economics at Berkeley and I had started there in operations research and had discovered that I just wasn’t that interested in doing operations research stuff. And I walked around campus and found an urban economist named John Quigley and we had a nice chat about what he was doing and he said, you know, you should study economics and study study cities because there are large complex systems that never get boring. They’re always changing. And so I switched from operations research into economics, got the job at USC and then fell into the real estate people and have been doing kind of real estate and urban stuff ever since.

Anthony Orlando (2m 3s):
Well I backed into real estate and urban planning and urban economics. My original interest was in finance, that’s what I studied in college and It was the financial crisis and the housing bubble that first got me interested in it. And then I went to get my PhD at USC where I studied with Chris and the other folks at the price school. And so now I’m an associate professor of finance real estate and law at Cal Poly Pomona. I teach real estate, real estate finance, some urban planning and economics classes and I do research on a variety of housing and real estate issues.

Jeff Wood (2m 34s):
And was this something like, so Anthony, you just mentioned that you kind of fell into it, but I’m curious if this is something you all somewhat paid attention to when you were younger? I usually ask folks if they were interested in trains or things when they were kids, but housing policies a little bit different. I think in that respect

Anthony Orlando (2m 48s):
I was, I think maybe unusual in that sense because most of the people I know who are in urban fields were interested in cities and transportation from a young age. I grew up in a very rural area and so I actually didn’t give a lot of thought to city issues until I started living in them. Obviously I became a lot more interested once I went to college, I went to college in Philadelphia, so that was the first big city that I experienced. But it took a while for me to really understand that It was such a complex field that I needed to spend a lot of time to really dig in and understand.

Chris Redfearn (3m 21s):
Yeah, on my end, I actually remember the moment I sort of thought of myself as an urbanist and It was in Chicago. I was at Northwestern and I had borrowed a friend’s motorcycle ’cause you know I couldn’t, I couldn’t own my own motorcycle. My dad would kill me for that one, but he let me borrow it one day. And so I was driving up Lake Shore Drive, I actually stopped at some point and realized that the skyline was a series of decisions like you know, there was a 40 story office building there, but it could have been 45, someone chose 40 and for some reason this light bulb went on. But any one of those buildings could have been a hotel or a restaurant or a multi-family building, whatever. But you know, someone had made that choice and then you realize that It was a bunch of decisions behind it. And then at that point you’re like, once you start seeing cities as a choice of series of decisions, it kind of changes the way you think about cities. So they’re the outcome of a whole bunch of accumulated decisions over a long period of time.

Chris Redfearn (4m 4s):
Once you start seeing the world that way, you’re kind of a real estate guy.

Jeff Wood (4m 7s):
There’s a great Emily Badger article yesterday in the New York Times talking about the congestion pricing discussion that they’re having right now and like the big decision that didn’t happen. And I find that interesting in the context of what you just said because there’s things that cities have done that are big, obviously most of the time it’s little things that add up, right? But there’s also these big decisions that happen over time that make those skylines happen. And so it’s really fascinating to hear that from you. So you all wrote a paper and I really, really appreciate it. Houston, you have a problem, How, large cities accommodate more housing and when I read it I knew I had to talk to you all about this because it really pulled together a bunch of ideas about things that I had had on my mind for a while. But first I kind of wanna place it in context. I’m wondering how your paper is framed by current discussions about housing supply and cost in the United States at the moment.

Chris Redfearn (4m 51s):
Yeah, so you know, for a long time housing in the United States has basically been a kind of a boring product. you know, it kind of grew within house prices kind of grew with inflation over a long period of time. And so as people needed more housing they would just build more at the periphery. And that’s just, we’ve been doing that for years. And then as we came out of the recession, the great recession oh 8, 0 9 and 10 is that ever since then house prices have risen kind of above inflation and it’s been really broad based. And so where housing bubbles happened in places locally where there’s always been housing bubbles around, you know, Boston and LA have had, Houston’s had them in earlier on, those kind of things. But this was really broad based and persistent high level of inflation and house prices. And I think a lot of people are trying to figure out what’s going on with it. And so I think our question was, you know, it’s a supply and demand outcome somehow.

Chris Redfearn (5m 34s):
And so we wanted to sort of focus on the supply side and just ask like has it changed? Like what’s different before 2010 and after? And we picked Texas and California because you know, infamously, I mean there’s lots of things that are similar about them, but they have kind of pro-business versus pro-regulation kind of dichotomy between the two. And that’s why people think about the two places is the states are heavy, the blue states are heavily regulated and California’s one of these places and Texas is free, free reign and pro business and you can do whatever you want. And so if that were the case then house prices in Houston should have kind of stayed right with inflation, right? Because anytime prices rise you should be able to build more supply. But you know, from 2014 to to 2000 house prices rose in Houston just the same rate as LA did.

Chris Redfearn (6m 14s):
And so that sort of inconsistent with our conventional wisdom about supply. And so we just wanted to study that and that’s where it got started.

Anthony Orlando (6m 21s):
I think the other thing that we’ve thought about from an early point in the research project was that supply had been studied mostly from an aggregate level and that most of the research that had been done previously was comparing across cities, which we do some of in this paper. But one thing you’ll notice that’s different about the way we’re approaching it from the way a lot of economists have approached it is that we’re focusing on every neighborhood within those cities. It’s not just how many new units has Houston added and how many new units has Los Angeles added. One of our motivating questions was where do the new units go? And we hadn’t seen a good study that really identifies exactly where and if there’s a trend to why they get built in certain neighborhoods rather than in others and whether those trends are different across those cities.

Anthony Orlando (7m 7s):
So we really wanted to break down those aggregate numbers into the neighborhood level and once we did that, that’s where we started to find some really interesting stuff.

Jeff Wood (7m 15s):
I also wanna go back in time a little bit, I wanna hear a little bit about post-war housing because I think that that time period part of this is really important too.

Chris Redfearn (7m 22s):
Yeah. So you know, after World War ii, you know that the country as a whole is very under housed, right? And so a couple things happen. One is we have kind of a wealthy growing economy that has a rising middle class that wants to do more things than just live in tight constrained housing in in urban areas. And so that causes suburbanization occur and then the federal government puts in the highway plan that puts highways all over the place and makes land a lot more available and a lot more accessible. And that causes suburbanization occur. And so we have this huge wave of suburbanization that code in the fifties and sixties and through the seventies and in LA the city kind of grows up valley by valley by valley. So the San Gabriel Valley fills up at one point and the San Fernando Valley fills up and we go out to Santa Clarita that way. And so that’s just the way it fills up. And that’s one of the, the background observations we make in the paper is that when there is housing demand, where do you build it?

Chris Redfearn (8m 7s):
Well you build it where land is cheap, right? So that’s, you know, the obvious, obvious thing to do. That’s the cheapest way to build a single family attached home is to find cheap land for it. So you kind of going further and further out and you know at some point LA taps out And on one side it’s the Pacific Ocean, on the other side it’s the desert and then we got Camp Pendleton to the south and the nor, you know, just, you just start running these, these boundaries, you start running outta freed land and then the distances get enormous and then you know, you’re no longer really part of this metropolitan area if you’re a hundred miles from downtown. So you start realizing that people don’t really wanna be that far out and then they start moving infill and then the technology starts to change and the dynamics start to change. And that’s what we saw in the maps in LA was that there was still some infill occurring, I mean, sorry, when exurban development occurring at the periphery at the very far periphery, but the majority of the units were, were infill.

Chris Redfearn (8m 52s):
And that’s where we sort of saw the pictures in in Houston and Dallas and San Antonio was that this was starting to happen there too. Is that, so at some point they had grown wider and wider and wider and bigger and covered lots and lots of single payment attached shown in the suburbs and excerpts and then they kind of started to rotate more towards infill and that was fun to see in the maps.

Anthony Orlando (9m 12s):
Yeah, another way to think about your question is why don’t we build what like we used to, which is a question we hear a lot of and I think it comes back to maybe the most fundamental principle in economics, which is scarcity. In the post-war era there was a lot more abundant land and that’s why we were able to build in the way that Chris is describing. When you move forward in time, you start to build out the cities, you don’t use up all the land, but you start to get to land that’s more and more difficult to build on or further and further away. And so land becomes more scarce. It’s not the only reason why it’s harder to build than it used to be, but it’s a big piece of the puzzle that we don’t think has been pointed out quite well enough.

Anthony Orlando (9m 54s):
Before this,

Jeff Wood (9m 56s):
Chris you said far out and then Anthony you said further away, but from what?

Chris Redfearn (10m 1s):
Yeah, so that’s a, that’s a, that’s a great question. So we, we have this agenda around this supply study, right? So it’s not one thing, there’s a bunch, there’s a bunch of papers here, but, but clearly like there’s land all over the United States is empty, right? And so being far from what is is the material question, right? And you know, I broadly will say amenities. So you know, in the kind of the basic urban model where we, we train urban economists to think is we have the CBD, the central business district is downtown where all the employment is and people radiate out from there and commute in and that’s the, the primary trade off is between the amount of housing they get and the commute they make. But you know, once you start mixing in all the other amenities like quality of schools, restaurants, retail opportunities, you know everything open space, you know all the things, you start counting it on. And then the question is what do people want to pay for these days?

Chris Redfearn (10m 42s):
I think one of the things that we’d like to do in the future we haven’t certainly not done in this paper is kind of enumerate where the amenities are, right? I think that would be really fun because you know, if you think about Las Vegas as being, you know, a completely vibrant city, right? But it’s a desert, right? There’s no natural amenity. Like there’s obviously hiking and beauty and there’s lots of things out there but there’s lots of desert. You’d never start a city there, right? No one would say this is the right place to start a city. There’s no water here, there’s no infrastructure, why would you ever start a city there? But you know, Las Vegas starts because of a couple of other historical reasons and it persists because amenities are there, right? We’re actually building a high speed rail now from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and it’s kind of bizarre when you think about it, right? Why would you wanna do that? So you get back to, you ask the where from what is from from amenities and then amenities is a very big umbrella.

Chris Redfearn (11m 23s):
but yeah, that’s it.

Anthony Orlando (11m 25s):
Now in the paper we’ve got a couple of things that we do just to make it concrete. One is we measure where we call them nnu in the paper net new units. So essentially we’re saying where the housing stock is expanding after you account for demolitions and reductions in the housing stock as well. So where do new units get added? And one thing we find is that originally they were getting added further away from the central business district. We know that none of these cities are perfectly mono centric or anything like that, but just as a, as an approximation we do find that they used to be built further away from the core of the city and now they’re starting to move back further in. And we know that a lot of those amenities are located in the core, like Chris is saying, another way that we look at it is what’s the density of the neighborhoods where the new units are getting located?

Anthony Orlando (12m 11s):
And it used to be that new units were getting located in very low density neighborhoods where they’re not near a lot of other people and a lot of other stuff. And now the average net new unit that’s getting added is getting added in much more dense neighborhoods, which suggests there’s a lot more infill and they are probably closer to amenities because they’re closer to other people. And that’s where the amenities tend to locate. And a lot of this comes back to the broader problem, which I’m sure a lot of people in the audience are aware of. There’s a very famous urban economist up at Berkeley and Ricoh Moretti who’s done work suggesting that you know, one of the key sources of productivity growth in the United States is agglomeration is the fact that we locate near each other.

Anthony Orlando (12m 55s):
So these amenities are not just a source of consumption benefits for us to enjoy, they’re also a source of economic growth that when we’re all located near each other, we’re much more of an economic powerhouse. And so when you locate new units further away, you’re locating them further away from not just amenities that we enjoy but also from the ability to have high productivity, high wage jobs and now we’re trying to come back closer in, but it’s harder to build in those places.

Jeff Wood (13m 23s):
It’s interesting, we just had Michael Batty on to talk about his book The Computable City and he was talking about how basically early on in computing they were trying to model cities, right? And they were using the standard model. I think It was, I think It was von Thon and his work as the first wave of thinking about cities as you know, basically you have the center and then they go up from the center to get land and housing and things like that. And I find it interesting that, you know, that was kind of the way that people looked at things and then now we’re trying to put it on its head and think about it a little bit differently or is it the same? I’m curious what you all think about that.

Chris Redfearn (13m 52s):
I think it’s super interesting to think about the cities we were talking about. ’cause you can talk about Houston in much more detail than I can, but like, you know, Los Angeles is, if you look at a map of, you know, the, the first roadmaps like the, I got a map of like 1918 and 1921. I got a nice roadmap that I digitized and and wrote a paper around and you can actually predict the employment in Los Angeles now using that map better than you can the current highway system. Because the original road systems were meant to connect the centers that were in the region and that made them more productive. To Anthony’s point about agglomeration, it made them more productive ’cause the roads were connected and more people drove back and forth. And once the, the first highway in in LA is between downtown LA and Pasadena and you know, once you put that in there, both LA and Pasadena get more productive.

Chris Redfearn (14m 35s):
And so more people want to be there. And so more development occurs there and that sort of reinforces these systems. And so the set of amenities around the LA basin are really unevenly distributed, but they’re based on some historic pattern that wasn’t part of the sort of the traditional mono centric model where you sort here’s the CBD and radiate out from there. So It was a CBD when, you know, in 1850 for something and then it grew larger and larger and involved other centers. And now we’ve got these sort of set of many scattered, you know, kind of broadly all over the region. They’re really unevenly distributed. So I think part of the problem that the modeling in cities this way is that you have to start with a, an uneven starting point. And so the starting point for this modeling gets really tricky.

Anthony Orlando (15m 14s):
Well, and if you assume that in a mono centric city, whatever direction you move in, it’s going to follow roughly the same pattern, which is that’s, that’s the idea right? Northeast, south and west we kind of collapse it all into one graph and just say distance from the C, BD, no matter what distance you’re at, this is the type of neighborhood you should have. But look at most cities in America, right? You move west or east or south in Los Angeles you get very, very different types of neighborhoods. Some of it is because of the way transportation networks were built, like Chris was saying, some of it is because of racist policies like redlining that were instituted in South LA but not in northeast la. And so suddenly you’ve got completely different amounts of investment that are going to those different neighborhoods.

Anthony Orlando (15m 57s):
And even after those redlining policies are outlawed, you have path dependence, right? You can’t just rebuild a city from scratch. So what’s there helps to determine what winds up going there later on.

Jeff Wood (16m 10s):
It’s interesting from a Houston perspective, which is where I grew up in thinking about places like the Woodlands and how that grew up on the outskirts of the city. George Mitchell bought a bunch of land, he had him a car come in and design the first segment and then it grew like gangbusters because there’s so much open land. But then later on ExxonMobil decides to leave downtown Houston and move their headquarters up there. Other places start to move and gravitate in that direction. And the Woodlands is now starting to think of itself more like a CBD or a central amenity to a lot of places around it. And so you have the original Houston but then you have all of these satellites around it and similar to LA and what Chris was talking about. But it’s interesting to see that in real time and how decisions that businesses make, you know, change how the rest of it, you know, plays out as well.

Jeff Wood (16m 50s):
And the decision that TxDOT for example makes widening highways and where they’re gonna widen highways. I remember when I was a kid it seemed like Highway 59, which is I think I 59 now, was always under construction. Yeah. And so it just funnel more people from further and further north and so those decisions play into this as well.

Chris Redfearn (17m 7s):
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I’ve just finished reading, I finally finished a power broker, I don I don know if, have you actually read it? I know everyone I know owns it but no one’s finished it and I, I have

Jeff Wood (17m 16s):
It on audiobook and I still haven’t read it. Yeah, I mean I know it because it’s just ubiquitous but you know,

Chris Redfearn (17m 21s):
But you know the story, right? And then they build lots of freeways and it changes the landscape and as a result of that, individual developers make choices about where to build housing and Homer like the entire landscape changes because of transportation, right? So like to your point, they’re always under, you said 59 is always under construction. It’s like the more you build it, the more people come and then it reinforces this, you’re never gonna alleviate through more freeways, right? Yeah. That’s not gonna happen.

Jeff Wood (17m 44s):
I wanna get back to that in a little bit. I wanna get back to that ’cause I think that’s an interesting point, especially about Houston and expansion of 45 and we just had Megan Kimball on to talk about, but we’ll get into it in a second. Yeah. I want to kind of crystallize what you all are saying in the paper, which is basically, you know, cities accommodate growth by building more housing units on the periphery, then what that land quote unquote runs out, eventually the cheaper land is consumed and developers begin to focus on infill, which is what Anthony was talking about. And then also the number of tracks participating in growth is reduced over time suggesting the ossification of neighborhoods. So those are the three things that I kind of picked up from the paper is that like we grow until we can’t, we start to do infill, which is more expensive and then neighborhoods are also ossifying at the same time.

Jeff Wood (18m 25s):
I wanna talk about that kind of change from the growth on the outside to changing to infill and some of the kind of construction things. Because part of the paper that was really interesting to me as well is thinking about construction costs or land costs or the things that make it harder to build after you’ve run out of land on the periphery to what I would call sprawl.

Chris Redfearn (18m 43s):
Yeah. So the three of them smiling here, here is just because this, this is a big can of worms, right? Like this is, you know, the paper I think in some ways is very descriptive and very aggregate in some way. you know, we, we dive in and do this mapping locally, which is I think, you know, a step in the right direction but there’s still lots of details left to be sorted out here. But I think like a lot of urban housing economists sort of think about development as a black box. And so you know, when prices rise there’s a force at work and, and some atomistic small industry that doesn’t have much industrial structural power has, you know, goes ahead and builds things and you know, we, we get outcomes but I think Anthony and I have both spent enough time with enough actual practitioners to see that the difference between single family tach home construction and multifamily construction and type one, you know, tall construction are really, really different and they have different sets of risks and different sets of capital providers and different sets.

Chris Redfearn (19m 30s):
You know, like they’re just, they’re just different and they work in these different orbits. And so that’s the starting point there is I think we need to think about differentiating these things. And so what you get with the infield development is that the scale is just gone, right? So the master plan developers in the periphery, like so much of LA was built by master developers who would tie up 10,000 acres and they would subdivide and phase and they would put in the schools and the infrastructure and they, they had a plan in mind. But you know we talked about before about how hard it is to change cities once you build it. But you know, going back into in info means, you know, finding a 50 by one 50 site and then squeezing in on it as much as you can. And that’s hard. I mean it, it’s just super hard from a design perspective. You wanna do subterranean parking on a site like that. You lose a bunch of land just to getting an underground or not. That’s really expensive and that makes it more expensive.

Chris Redfearn (20m 10s):
Like so all these things change and one of my students, you know, become a friend, he actually worked on my house with me, he is an infill developer and he just tells me these horror stories about when you try to do a small site is you can’t get the plumber to park on the project. Like you, you’ve got this site and you want your plumber to drive right up with all his tools and all the piping and all that kind of stuff and it may not be able to park on the site, he has to park down the street. And so just little things like that make development more complicated. It’s an entire headache getting his crew on the site and the materials parked and in a way that greenfield never has to do. And with Greenfield you’ve got acres of space and you can park anywhere where you want and just start tearing up dirt and putting infrastructure in. It’s really easy and when you inherit some other site you have to go underground and upgrade all the facilities, which is not trivial.

Chris Redfearn (20m 53s):
And there’s a bunch of infrastructure you have to sort of think about working around, which you don’t have to do with greenfield. And so we just like inherently the entire business model changes in ways. So when we start rotating from ex urban greenfield development into infill development, just the level of complexity, cost, time, horizon risk, all those things get higher. I think part of the reason what we’re seeing in the falling elasticities of, of housing supply is, is exactly this is, it’s just harder to do.

Anthony Orlando (21m 15s):
And before all of that you’ve gotta get a parcel that actually works for an infill development like that. And so there’s a lot more land assembly that’s required for infill development and for multifamily than there is for greenfield and single family. There aren’t large parcels just freely available in the city center anymore. You usually have to piece together multiple parcels and sometimes there are odd shapes and odd sizes and you know, there’s good work showing that the more land assembly you have to do, the more expensive the development is. And in a place like Los Angeles County, almost half of large developments these days require some form of land assembly.

Anthony Orlando (21m 56s):
According to the latest studies that we’ve seen.

Chris Redfearn (21m 58s):
We actually look at these sort of where are there big sites that are heavily amenitized? There are these post-industrial sites, right? So the thing about the arts district in Los Angeles, a place that was largely abandoned as manufacturing left California, that’s a big site and it’s relatively near lots of amenities, right? There’s near downtown, there’s near transit, there’s, there’s lots of things there. So you know, one of the areas that we’ve seen a lot of development is in these post-industrial sites. And that’s true in Houston, it’s true in lots of places is where manufacturing’s rotated. But that’s a finite number if you look at the map and sort of how much area is there, you know, there’s not much of it. And so we’re filling like this, the latest splurge in where we’re, we’re getting units built is we’re not getting it built in the much in the infill. We see like we have lots of fights over infil, it’s not a big number. Most of the numbers are still exurban and then we see post industrials being a significant channel also.

Chris Redfearn (22m 42s):
But my, my big frustration there with the infill stuff is that they build these stumpy buildings and so this is your chance to build towers and if you build four over twos there, you’re gonna get stuck with four over two density and it’s gonna be take another generation or two to or through it into a higher density. So there’s this kind of interesting story about we’re building inelasticity in those places also because we’re making it lower density than we ought to.

Jeff Wood (23m 2s):
And related to that though, you’re talking about how the changes happen in these different states. So California versus Texas and you have California which hit that edge and started to do more info early on. And so you have the higher prices we keep on talking about running outta land, but nobody ever runs outta land. It’s just like running out of huge tracks of property for single family home development. But they started that earlier and then Texas might be hitting this wall soon too. So that is another part of your paper that I think is really interesting is that, you know, you’re basically saying the regulatory environments maybe don’t matter as much as we say they do and Texas is just behind California and maybe like a place like Las Vegas, which I sent you an article saying Las Vegas is saying that it’s gonna run outta land in eight years. Maybe Las Vegas is just behind Texas.

Chris Redfearn (23m 42s):
Yeah and Phoenix is in the same boat too. They’re running outta land also. So you know, I think we’re I don know Anthony if you wanna say we’re willing to make a a strong statement about this. But I think we’re, we’re suggestive but we’re still working on it. We hate to sound like an economist here, but like, but I think what we’re really pushing here is we know that regulation matters at the margin. And so when we know that topography matters at the margin, so we like the literature is really demonstrated that those, they’re abundantly true. And so the question is like is that explaining everything? And that’s where we are is we’re looking at other margins here. In this case the land assembly story is one of ’em. And the other thing we haven’t really talked about is filtering, right? And so, you know, how did we provide more affordable housing in the past? That’s when we were going out to the greenfield. So the lack of the greenfield isn’t necessarily a bad thing by itself for other reasons, but that just means that the, the chain of houses that went from a upper middle class house that was built in the seventies and then someone left that to go to a bigger house further out, then a bigger house further out, left behind a depreciated house.

Chris Redfearn (24m 29s):
Like that’s been the primary mechanism for delivering middle class housing is that now we have people moving infill. And that’s tying this back to the whole story about amenities is that at some point people have preferences about what they like. And so at one point people just wanted a big house away from everybody like getting away from noxious downtowns. There’s the primary move after World War ii a lot of downtowns were really industrial and polluted and crowded and people wanted to get away from that. So we’ve been suburbanized, you know, for 150 years. But you know, once you get out far enough out, you got a big enough house and you got those things, you also want some other amenities and so you wanna move back in. I think what we’re gonna see is this dynamic about where, you know, where people are in their cycle is we’re gonna have land development that is running out at the same time people want higher amenities and both those things are gonna work towards more info.

Anthony Orlando (25m 14s):
One way that we kind of visualize that in the paper is we map out what the distribution of neighborhoods looks like over time in these different cities. And it’s not surprising that in Los Angeles you find that the number of neighborhoods that have just a ton of vacant land goes down over time. But the number of neighborhoods in Houston goes down over time too that have a lot of vacant land. And so you’re right that it’s not like we’re filling up all the land. You, you, you never fully run out of land in the United States. You can always go further away. But within what we consider to be the metropolitan area where people are willing to commute, the number of neighborhoods where there’s a lot of land available has gone down dramatically.

Anthony Orlando (25m 54s):
And it’s really actually quite stunning to see in the Texas cities how the changes in those graphs look a lot like what Los Angeles’s graphs look like just a few decades earlier. Now I don’t wanna say, and and Chris was trying to make this point too, we don’t wanna say that regulation doesn’t matter, it does matter. There’s a lot of literature suggesting that it does. It’s not surprising. You make it harder to build, you make it more expensive to build, it’s gonna be more expensive to get housing. But when we first started studying this and we start first started presenting some of our findings to other urban economists and planners and policy analysts maybe about five or six years ago, one of the first presentations we gave, we went through a list of studies by other economists that looked at the actual impact of land use regulations in different cities.

Anthony Orlando (26m 46s):
So for example, if we were to change the zoning in one city to a different type of zoning, how many new units would we actually be adding and how would that actually impact prices? Economists have been good at studying this and and they’ve found statistically significant effects but what’s the magnitude that we’re talking about? We started adding up the magnitudes from their own studies and what we found is if you change some of these regulations, you don’t come anywhere close to adding enough units to actually close the gap in what anybody measures to be the housing shortage that we have in the United States. So it matters but even if we changed a lot of the regulations that we’re worried about, we still don’t think that would completely fix the problem.

Anthony Orlando (27m 28s):
It might not even come close.

Jeff Wood (27m 30s):
Is it a geography issue? I mean thinking about greenfield properties and building 10,000 single family homes versus building 10,000 properties on a couple of infill parcels. That’s a huge difference, especially as what Chris mentioned, like building four over ones. It doesn’t, you know, move the needle really if you’re just doing a couple, you know, 20 units here and 20 units there versus like the 10,000 that was built when the neighborhood that I was born and grown up in outside of Houston, which was very colorful on your map in thinking about how the city was expanding their housing stock.

Chris Redfearn (27m 57s):
So I’m gonna throw out another paper that we’re not done yet. I’ve been working with Casey and John McCormick and a guy named Brian Aubrey and they are planning consultant data analytical people and so they’ve helped sort of put together some co to scrap data to actually track development in Los Angeles, the city of Los Angeles. And it’s been super interesting to watch ’cause it kind of gets to this question about, you know, what happens when you change regulation? So we’ve been tracking the TOC program, so this is the Los Angeles Transit-oriented communities program and within a certain distance from a qualified transit stop you can build, you know by right? And there’s less regulation there. And what we found is that when you started this program it created a bunch of interest, right? And and there was like aha, we’re gonna build all this density around transit, which is what we want planners like this.

Chris Redfearn (28m 38s):
And so as long as we make it by array we should get a lot of stuff built and sure enough we got thousands of applications and then we got thousands of permits approved and so we got all these entitled units and the large majority of ’em are not getting built. So it is a really, it’s a really interesting dynamic here. It’s like there is entitlements and regulation, then there’s construction and there’s the market risk and all these things work together at once And so there’s no magic silver bullet. I think that’s one of the things that Anthony and I are kinda keeps circling back on is that all these programs as part of a portfolio of solutions, you know ADUs, TOC, you have this new EED one project now LA too. Like they all are gonna result in some new units but they’re not gonna result in enough. And I think that’s the kinda the conversation we’re gonna kind of reach at the end of our research project at some point hopefully is like what’s the right, what’s the right way to organize cities to actually get enough housing?

Chris Redfearn (29m 22s):
’cause I don’t see any of these programs as as delivering enough, we started writing this paper ’cause we were trying to explain why house prices were high and at the end of it you sort of get this conclusion like it’s gonna require a lot more of something and it’s not just one thing and we just need, you know, I mean the number in LA is like 700,000 additional units and the TOD program TOC program has resulted I think in something like 9,000 units getting built. And so that’s seven years old now at this point. So it’s just, you know, it’s

Jeff Wood (29m 47s):
Do you think it’s financing? I mean because you know the banks have a certain product that they understand and know and like single family homes on the periphery is a product that they know and understand and you know infill projects, each one is kind of a one-off special thing. It might be a little different in each instance but I’m curious if that’s, if that’s part of the problem. don don’t

Chris Redfearn (30m 4s):
Think it’s, I think cap capital certainly plays an important role ’cause if they don’t understand it, at least they perceive risks that’re gonna stay away and so it’s gonna make it hard to fund things. But I think for the most part in LA anyways is that land prices rise so you know, if you, if you give someone more power to do something and I think, you know, we’ve seen the same thing with the A DU programs is you know, you give them more rights to build things and people just feel wealthier then they don’t feel like they need to build something. Yeah,

Anthony Orlando (30m 26s):
Remember also that a lot of the things we’re talking about make it riskier to build infill and riskier to build multifamily and the riskier than it is the higher the expected return than investors are gonna have. And so a lot more projects aren’t gonna pencil so it becomes a financing problem specifically because there’s so many impediments to getting things built. Investors don’t wanna take on those risks unless they can guarantee pretty high returns and a lot of projects can’t fulfill that.

Jeff Wood (30m 53s):
I wanna talk about the ossification question and I’m wondering if you can kind of explain what the paper says and related to this topic of neighborhoods not changing.

Chris Redfearn (31m 3s):
So we found that happening because we did these transition frequencies. We sort of looked at what’s the housing density on a census track basis for these eight metropolitan areas. And we’re doing it again for the, for the nation as a whole right now. But we, we generally find that once you get to a certain density you stop building, I mean not stops but the participation rate so that the percentage of census tracks that engage in significant amounts of new supply is high earlier in their development and at one point they reach some density and they stop participating. So once you reach, you know, six per acre in units or seven units per acre, something like that, it’s just harder to add more stuff and say this case you’re Anthony’s exactly right at that point if you want to add more, you have to do land assembly, right?

Chris Redfearn (31m 43s):
So you get that sort of ossification but the, the ossification is kinda a bigger issue than that. That’s something that Tom alone and I did a couple years ago in a paper and in that one we just found this for remarkable persistence in in ranks. And it’s interesting because prices would move up and down and education would move and we had the race and ethnicity in there also. And so we had, we had these things that would change over time but the ranks would always stay the same. So the persistence was really remarkable. Like Beverly Hills is, you know, amongst the top price markets in in LA but it’s always been that way. And so when it’s much higher than the median is when people are feeling wealthy and they bid up the price of Beverly Hills and then when they’re wealthy don’t feel that wealthy, the price comes down but they don’t ever come down lower than than Compton, right? So they have this, this hierarchy and then So they think I was sort of organized It was that you know if you, you know you’ve got fixed income and you’ve got some things you wanna do, you got a wife who is working somewhere and you’re working somewhere and you got kids who have to go to college or school or something and you pick your location to maximize your bundle, right?

Chris Redfearn (32m 37s):
You’d love to have more house if you had more money but you’ve spent your money on location, right? So you kind of maximize your choice when you get a raise, what do you do? Do you try to change your whole neighborhood or do you move to a different neighborhood that has the bundle? And so what ends up happening is I think systematically people are constantly rearranging when they have shocks to their income. They have more income, they can buy more of the stuff they like and that includes location as well as house and So. They move to the neighborhood that has their next step of the ladder or step down the ladder if they go down the ladder. And so the ladders persevere because of this is that people are making choices to move around the threshold and the hierarchies and the hierarchy just kind of persists over time. So gentrification, it’s funny ’cause gentrification’s sort of the story and you know it’s real, it just not the norm Like most neighborhoods are kind of where they were 30, 40 years ago and the persistence, the rank persistence anyways is just stunning.

Chris Redfearn (33m 21s):
It’s like 90% so over 40, 50 years the ranking wherever neighborhood was in in 1970s is basically the same as It was in 2020. Which I think I think is kind of amazing given all the amount, all the churning that’s occurred in la, all the change in industry, all the change in people and immigrants, all the groups that have changed kind of changed and made LA different over the years. The neighborhood ranks are very, very constant. And then once you go to a place that’s less dynamic, we we said like Bridgeport, Connecticut, you know Bridgeport connects not changed very much and the the rank persistent there is like 94%, 95% like very little has changed in Bridgeport over 40 years across the things we measured. but yeah, I think this is again I think kind of a fun phenomenon. Like once you lay out a city and put the highways where it are and put the employment centers where they are and the retail where it is, it takes a lot to dislocate that and we just don’t have shocks like that here in the states.

Jeff Wood (34m 7s):
How much is that a a function of the transportation network too? I mean we for sure laid out cities a certain way early on the grid network and then it kind of LA’s a little different obviously, but a lot of places then they went to the kind of the cul-de-sac method of doing things. And so the thing that came up in my mind when I was reading that It was just like you can change, you know, an inner part of the city Houston has allowed itself to grow inside the loop very famously, but outside of that, you know you have these network of of roads that really don’t maybe facilitate the growth maybe like they might have before. It might also just be a function of distance from amenities like you were talking about. But I’m curious like what the role the transportation existing might play into that.

Chris Redfearn (34m 47s):
No, I think you hit it right in the nose there. Which is, which is, that’s why I think that the map, if you wanna study the employment of Los Angeles, you look at a map from 1918 or 1921 ’cause all of those roads were highly, highly functional to connect density pla dense places to other dense places so that the road went straight from, from one city to another city and then the modern highway system was about getting around them, right? So with the the newer freeway system like the 15 and two 15 which are, you know, newer highways in the LA basin, they don’t have as many employment centers on ’em ’cause they’re really designed to go around places and so the existing nodes of concentration are built there now and they build around those existing subcenters. We don’t have lots of new,

Jeff Wood (35m 27s):
So another question I have then is about building transportation infrastructure now and what that means if the cities as we see them are going to kind of start to move towards that next generation of growth towards infill and things like that. The highway policies that we have in lots of places, especially in states like Texas, is just continue to widen the highways until you have no more room to widen them anymore. Or they’re gonna keep trying as long as they can. Like I mentioned earlier we had Megan Kimball on to talk about the freeway fighters that are fighting highways all over the country and specifically in Texas in places like Austin and Dallas and Houston as well. And I 45 is getting widened again through downtown Houston. But I really don’t understand what the benefit of that is.

Jeff Wood (36m 8s):
If you’re gonna not have these flows of people from further and further away continue because you quote unquote ran outta land.

Chris Redfearn (36m 16s):
Transportation in cities are the same issue, right? I mean they’re, we’ve been studying cities for a long time and when transportation costs fall, cities get bigger ’cause it’s easier to get access to land, right? So we talked about Robert Moses before and you know, he built lots of roads and it made lots of Long Island get developed into housing, right? So when you ask about what the right policy is, I used, this is where we get back to sort of this holistic response like there is no silver bullet, right? Holding everything constant. If you added more freeways that would help, but there isn’t, we don’t hold it constant like as soon as that freeway’s there, that makes some other person say, oh now I can actually drive further away to my house, right? So people respond to these things all the time. I think part of the reason I’m frustrated with a lot of housing policy abroad writ large is that we think about these things in margins as opposed to general equilibrium.

Chris Redfearn (36m 59s):
You know, my daughter went to Madrid for the spring as a part of our semester abroad. you know, we visited her and she said, you know, dad, why can’t we have trains like this in LA? Like, you know, you took the train everywhere, it stopped all the time. It ran all the time. It was clean, It was busy all the time. Like well it’s because they organized it in a way that actually makes it useful, right? And so right now we have this train station we spent, you know, billions of dollars on we and the, the rest of the states chipped in to help out with that one. And we didn’t build lots of density around all the stations that we don’t operate it way that makes it enticing. And so I’m not sure I’m answering your question about like the freeway system, but I feel like the transit system as a whole needs to think about how we’re gonna use the land uses at every station as part of that solution. And then it becomes really complicated because then you’re doing regional planning.

Chris Redfearn (37m 42s):
I don’t know if I have a single answer for this one. It’s a much lot maybe a different podcast for you. But like I think integrating land use and transportation policy seems necessary and I think having the conversation, what’s the right transit system has to be answered in concert with what’s the right land use policy.

Jeff Wood (37m 55s):
This is like something that I could go on for like five hours talking about this and trying to figure out kind of how transportation land use intersects so that we could get cheaper housing. There’s something that popped up recently that I’ve brought up on a number of shows and I think it’s just really fascinating. But in South Korea they have a fertility issue is kind of one of the major discussions that’s happening related to them. And one of their suggested solutions is to build six new rapid transit lines so that people could go home faster to be at home in the suburbs and have bigger houses and have more kids. There’s obviously like lots of different policy ways you could look at that. But I’m thinking about, you know, if, if we are going to be in the space where the results of your paper tell us something about regions and how they grow and what new new era we’re going into, what does that mean for like transportation spending?

Jeff Wood (38m 39s):
And it doesn’t have to be about highways, it could be about rapid transit, it could be about the way that we develop our bus systems or when those places do change over time and the places that aren’t ossifying are actually changing, then how do you serve those places as they become more dense and maybe the transportation network evolves to be different with them as they, as they change, but that is also more expensive, right? That changes the whole calculus of property taxes and spending and, and state taxes and what the state will give money to. I mean right now Texas for example is only giving money to highways. They wouldn’t give a cent a red cent to transit. They have to do it all themselves in cities. But it’s interesting to think about if you’re thinking about trying to figure out how to expand the housing pool so that more people can have affordable housing, what does that mean from a transportation standpoint?

Jeff Wood (39m 24s):
Does it mean that if you did, you know, build high-speed rail between Houston and Dallas, that those stations in between would be an open market for the old school of growing greenfield development? Like it’s interesting to think about the policies from transportation standpoint that would open up your model that you’re creating with the paper that you wrote.

Chris Redfearn (39m 42s):
Certainly I think that one way to think about adding more affordable housing is to provide transit to other places and allow amenities to be there as well, right? So if the government, you know, if the public were to provide more amenities in different places, then developers would build around them. But we don’t ever, we don’t ever talk about things that way. We talk about the public building housing, but you know, the private sector is really good at building housing. We just need to make it possible to happen. Like the story about California forever, it’s a really interesting story about a bunch of billionaires who are gonna try to build a brand new city in California with a fresh and a clean slate. It’s gonna be easier to do and they’re gonna maximize things. And you’re shaking your head already,

Jeff Wood (40m 19s):
Right? Oh, I’m shaking my head. ’cause you said easier and I I I ballot measures are never easy in California. Oh, exactly

Chris Redfearn (40m 23s):
Right. Srna but easier in the sense like if you could start fresh, you could build a system that would be in concert with the land use instead of doing what we’re doing now, which is we’ve inherited, you know, generations of, of one type of land use and we’re gonna try to shoehorn it into something else that’s kind of super inefficient, right? But I think getting back to like, the very first question I, we kinda started the paper with was, you know, why are house prices high amenities plays a significant role in this and so that now that people want more amenities and people are gonna build more housing near these amenities, then access to the amenities is really kind of the magic formula, right? And so some of, some combination of where the amenities are and how to get access to them is gonna allow people to live better. So I think that if, if there’s a rail line between Dallas and Houston, then stops between that should be and at high speed should allow access to Houston and Dallas in an easy way and people could live there and you could have more amenities there.

Chris Redfearn (41m 11s):
But the thing that we’re, we’re, we’re discovering in LA is that land prices might arise in a way that prevent this, right? So I guess I’m kind of hedging a little bit because I think it takes a much more general, kind of general equal models sort of thinking about these things as opposed to if everything was constant, yes, that would be true, but somehow there’s landowners out there who are gonna see the train tracks going that direction. Someone’s gonna step in and buy a bunch of land and then have higher prices for it. So it’s not gonna be quite as affordable as before. ’cause someone’s gonna earn a slice along that way.

Jeff Wood (41m 34s):
What’s something that you guys go back and forth about?

Chris Redfearn (41m 37s):
I, I think we go back and forth on is how to finish a paper. Like I, I think that we, we have, we have six or seven paper ideas that all relate to these things and they’re just not really well compartmentalized into a single idea. I think that’s our frustration is that, you know, we’ve been talking about this whole set of ideas that overlap and they do. And so I think when we start talking about what we’re gonna work on, you know, I’m the king of like starting something and we have this great conversation about it. And then Anthony will say, well let’s, let’s get together next week and talk about it and I’ll show up to something else. And so this is, this is what we go back and forth on, is how do you commit to a, a single idea and finish it ’cause don don’t know. I think a lot of these ideas are a little bit too complicated for a single paper sometimes.

Anthony Orlando (42m 14s):
I think the other thing we go back and forth on is part of the reason why I’ve been quiet in the second half of this interview. In addition to internet problems, it’s solutions. We’re great at identifying what the problems are, but these systems are so complex. Every time you think of a solution, you think of winners and losers. Every solution has winners and losers, right? You build something new, there’s winners and losers, there’s trade-offs to everything. And you heard Chris talk about some of them in his last couple of answers. And so I’m hesitant to say, well if we build a new transit network or if we build new housing or if we do this or that, then I think that’ll solve the problem. Because it often just creates a whole host of new problems. And it’s hard to predict all the different ramifications of any policy you’re gonna put in place.

Anthony Orlando (42m 58s):
Now you are working on new projects where we’re going to try to propose solutions, but it’s hard. It’s hard. you know, I, I, I’m always reminded, we have a dear friend who used to teach public policy classes and he would start every semester by saying to his students, there’s only one phrase that you’re not allowed to say in this class for the entire semester. You’re never allowed to start a sentence with the words. Why don’t we just, why don’t we just do X, Y, Z? Because why don’t we just suggest that there’s an easy answer and we’re all so dumb we haven’t thought of it. And thank goodness you all showed up to tell me what that easy answer is. Assume the low hanging fruit have been picked, assume that the problems that remain are the hard problems.

Anthony Orlando (43m 38s):
Now work forward from that premise because you’re much more likely to find interesting and useful solutions if you don’t assume that the solutions are

Jeff Wood (43m 47s):
Easy. Oh, didn didn’t say Why don’t we?

Anthony Orlando (43m 50s):
No, no you didn’t. No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t

Jeff Wood (43m 52s):
Suggesting that. Well, I do think it’s interesting going back to that California forever idea, kind of the back and forth that’s happening now with it because you know, we know some of the folks that are working on it and they are urbanists Gabe Metcalf who was at Spur for a long time

Chris Redfearn (44m 5s):
And he’s fabulous.

Jeff Wood (44m 6s):
I know other folks that are working for that that wish not to be named, but that are really good on stuff and have been really good in policy related to San Francisco and other places. But it’s really hard because you have the situation where the leader, and I said this in my newsletter this morning, he made a lot of political missteps and I was trying to compare it to Kathy Hoel and, and the congestion pricing misstep that was just made on her part for politics reasons. But you know, he was buying up land in secret. They were suing landowners saying they were colluding against them for just wondering what the value of their land was worth to them. Kind of a, a screw you price as I call it. And then they made all the enviros that might be on their side mad by just, you know, deciding to make everything internal and not having it on the main train line between Sacramento and the Bay Area and So.

Jeff Wood (44m 48s):
They were gonna be asking the state of California or the county for money for a highway that is gonna piss a bunch of people off. And so that goes to the trade-offs, right, that you’re talking about where you wanna build this 20 unit an acre, a new development on a greenfield site, you’re gonna have to build a coalition that is gonna vote for it, right? Which is, I think it’s like 68% against now at the moment in terms of the polling. And it’s tough when you make the missteps at the beginning. And so we’re talking about building new housing, people want new housing, but when you tell them that they’re gonna get amenities out of this, is it gonna be amenities for them or is it gonna be amenities for somebody else? And so if it’s amenities for somebody else, they’re probably not gonna vote for it or care about it as much.

Jeff Wood (45m 29s):
The solar array that they’re talking about building the schools and the housing and stuff, the people that are outside of that, they’re like, well, we’re already at our schools and we’re already at our housing, so you know, that’s not gonna make a difference for me. So I find those trade-offs in those discussions. Interesting. Especially from a politics level, thinking about how you’re actually gonna do it and it makes it harder to build new housing. And there’s other folks who have have said on the show, you know, maybe they should have had taken that billion dollars and bought a, a bunch of council members in cities and and just approved a lot of housing on the properties that they purchased or something, you know, a billion dollars can do a lot of stuff I feel like in politics. So, but

Chris Redfearn (46m 3s):
But Jeff, you’re the urbanist like name a city where the politics would’ve been any, any better. Like this is the nature of I think development right now is that we are really good at communicating with each other about stopping things. Yeah, right. That Nextdoor app is just the worst place in the world. Oh, just unbelievable. And ugh,

Jeff Wood (46m 18s):
The whole peninsula is bad, right? Like the

Chris Redfearn (46m 21s):
Bay Area, everything is better in 1958, right?

Jeff Wood (46m 23s):
Yeah, that’s the thing is like when they were building all this housing, I mean, nobody’s gonna object and also nobody’s gonna object to the greenfield development. you know, it’s not in their backyard yet, right? So

Chris Redfearn (46m 30s):
Let’s, in no one’s backyard right now, that’s the rationale at least that was, you know, we’re gonna go out there and talk to a single farmer by all of his land and it’s, no one’s gonna vote against it. Essentially. That’s, that’s why we have so much sprawl. But like how, how to put it, I think I’m naive enough to think that there’s good leadership out there that can actually navigate this. One of my friends is a mayor of Garden Grove, he’s been reelected three times, he’s termed out now and you know, I went to the state of the city address his last one and you know, there were thousands of people there. It was just, It was packed and It was diverse and supportive and you know, I’m sure there, there are some people who aren’t happy, but the vast majority of people seem to think the Garden grove was better because they developed in a particular way. You know, they found a way to add more supply and some, I’m sure things, some of the neighborhood changed because of that and some new people moved there, but somehow they, they kind of embraced change and now I’ve got a better restaurant scene than they had before and they had a better public schools and they have more public services.

Chris Redfearn (47m 20s):
And like my sense is like this is what needs to happen is this sort of conversation needs to be evolved next into, well if you don’t want development, what do you want? And I, you know, I think that in LA anyways, everyone says we want more housing but they don’t and we actually tax ourselves to get more affordable housing, you know, JJJ and that the homelessness stuff was we passed. But you know, then someone said, well we’ve raised the money now for it. Well let’s spend it in your neighborhood. Someone says, no they can’t have it here. ’cause that would change something. I mean that’s a, somehow this is part of the reason we’re on this path right now. And part of the reason conversation with you is like the conversation has to change, not too like, oh, I’m gonna stop everything because something’s gonna change no matter what you do. And the question is, can we help channel in a way that’s positive? I think that making good trade offs is like kind of one of the things I think Anthony, I would like to work on kinda be more kind of proactive about laying out what people’s choices are.

Chris Redfearn (48m 1s):
’cause the status quo has its own cost, right? Yeah,

Jeff Wood (48m 3s):
It does. Yeah. So

Chris Redfearn (48m 4s):
If you choose to fight everything, then you’re gonna have other things happening to you. And so it’s not free to to just say no to everything.

Jeff Wood (48m 11s):
So you finished this paper. I’m wondering where this leads you. Obviously you, you mentioned you have lots of stuff in the works or lots of ideas in mind. What’s, what does this lead you next?

Anthony Orlando (48m 22s):
Well, first I think we wanna see how these patterns extend to other cities around the country. California and Texas were probably the perfect laboratories to start trying to find these trends and they worked out really well for that. But we’ve started looking at, you know, like the largest 100 cities across the United States and we find a lot of similar patterns, but we haven’t finished that analysis yet. So that’s the next one. We also wanna do a version of what I said that very first presentation was that we gave where we wanna go through all the studies that have been done by the urban economists about the effects of different constraints on development, land use, regulations, geography, et cetera. And see, okay, based on what’s been measured, how many new units could we actually add if we made these changes?

Anthony Orlando (49m 5s):
Because we’re seeing places where reforms are going into place. There’s new policies coming outta Sacramento, there’s exciting changes in Minneapolis and so on. But you know, we have a lot of studies that we could use to actually predict how many new units could be built out of this. And so far what we’ve seen is it’s not as many as we’d like. So if we’re going to keep going down the road of thinking that these piecemeal reforms are the way to go, how much of the problem are we actually gonna solve? We can measure that and we can write a paper about that. Those are the next couple of things. And then the big picture thing is to take all this and put it together into some solutions. And we’re having a lot of interesting conversations with people about that. But that’s a little bit down.

Chris Redfearn (49m 44s):
Yeah, I, I do think that the pendulum is swinging a bit in the favor of the ybi movement. There’s just a general sense we need to be able to build more and that it’s gotten too easy to stop everything. But I think how you navigate, that’s gonna be really interesting. I think that’s where I’d like to sort of see the practitioner side start to play a bigger role is I think we know a lot about how housing markets work now. And the question is like, given what we know about how do you actually build good policy that’s equitable and fair, but ultimately constructive? I think that’s a just a, a really interesting set of set of questions. you know, the city of Los Angeles right now, I think the, the mayor is really eager to build more housing and I think that’s terrific. The impulse is the right place. And then the question is like, well how do you do that? Like how do you attract private capital to, to invest in LA and build more housing and who gets to own it?

Chris Redfearn (50m 25s):
Who gets to live there? I think those are really good questions, but again, I think the backdrop for me still is the cost to the status quo. ’cause if you, if you say no to everything, we’re gonna get the kind of flight we’re getting in LA City right now anyways. And so there’s a real pressure right now to start thinking about good, effective, balanced policy. And I’m not really sure what that means yet, but ask me again in a couple months. And I, that’s kind of what I’d like to spend more time.

Jeff Wood (50m 44s):
Well I’d love to have you all back on to talk about the solutions ’cause I think that’s really interesting. But I do appreciate where this is going because like I said it, it brought up a bunch of ideas in my mind and you know, there’s a whole bunch of other variables that we tossed onto this pile, right? Like climate change and, and insurance and all that stuff that makes it real interesting. So I appreciate that. Where can folks find the paper?

Anthony Orlando (51m 4s):
It’s available on the Real Estate Economics website. It’s also linked on my website, anthony w orlando.com. You can download a PDF in both of those places.

Jeff Wood (51m 12s):
Awesome. I’ll put it in the show notes as well. And then also, where can folks find you if you wish to be found

Chris Redfearn (51m 17s):
After spending, you know, 40 years? Trying not to be found. I but started posting on LinkedIn. Like that’s been my thing in the last, just, just a month ago I started posting on LinkedIn. So it’s been kind of fun to do that. But so I’m an amateur at this and Anthony’s got a substack that we’re gonna start writing on and so maybe that’s the best way to go. ’cause we’re gonna try to provide some running commentary on this going forward. That’s our plan, right Anthony? Yep,

Anthony Orlando (51m 36s):
Absolutely. So Anthony w orlando.substack.com.

Jeff Wood (51m 40s):
All right.

Chris Redfearn (51m 40s):
So that’s probably the best way to reach us.

Jeff Wood (51m 42s):
Awesome. Well thank you all for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Chris Redfearn (51m 46s):
It was fun to be here. Jeff, thank

Anthony Orlando (51m 47s):
You. It’s been fun.